How will changes in climate affect life on Earth?

Climate change is causing major problems for both people and wildlife [1].

Concerning wildlife, climate change, along with deforestation and hunting, means 25% of species are currently threatened with extinction [2].

Furthermore, it has caused 30% of the shallow-water coral in the Great Barrier Reef (Australia) to die in 2016 [3].

Climate change is also affecting people [1]; it has contributed to conflict in places such as in central Africa and played a part in the increase in the number of hungry people in the world from 784 million to 821 million between 2015 and 2017 [4,5,6].

As temperatures continue to rise, the effects of climate change will become more serious [7]. For example, if no action is taken against climate change, 0.5 metres of sea level rise will affect 800 million people living in 570 coastal cities across the globe by 2050 [8]. If you swipe across you’ll see a map showing cities with 10 million inhabitants or more, which are expected to suffer from this [8].

Clearly we want to stop this from happening! But in order to know how to tackle climate change, we first need to understand how it works. We’ll look at this in the next post!